How do I convert a column of text URLs into active hyperlinks in Excel?

Question

I have a column in excel, wherein I have all the website url values. My question is I want to turn the url values to active links. There are about 200 entries in that column

Answer 1

Pretty easy way for rather short lists:

1. Double click on the box where the url is
2. Enter

You have your link ;)

Answer 2

With Excel 2007 on Windows, I found these steps simplest;

1. Select cells with the non-active URLs
2. Copy
3. Paste as hyperlink

Answer 3

For me I just copied the entire column which has the URLs in text format into another application (say Evernote), and when they were pasted there they became links, and then I just copied them back into Excel.

The only thing here is you need to make sure the data you copy back lines up with the rest of the columns.

Answer 4

OK, here's a hokey solution, but I just can't figure out how to get Excel to evaluate a column of URLs as hyperlinks in bulk.

1. Create a formula, ="=hyperlink(""" & A1 & """)"
2. Drag down
3. Copy new formula column
4. Paste Special Values-only over the original column
5. Highlight column, click Ctrl-H (to replace), finding and replacing = with = (somehow forces re-evaluation of cells).
6. Cells should now be clickable as hyperlinks. If you want the blue/underline style, then just highlight all cells and choose the Hyperlink style.

The hyperlink style alone won't convert to clickable links, and the "Insert Hyperlink" dialog can't seem to use the text as the address for a bunch of cells in bulk. Aside from that, F2 and Enter through all cells would do it, but that's tedious for a lot of cells.

Answer 5

Put the URLs into an HTML table, load the HTML page into a browser, copy the contents of that page, paste into Excel. At this point the URLs are preserved as active links.

Solution was proposed on http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2008-macexcel/how-to-copy-and-paste-to-mac-excel-2008-a-list-of/c5fa2890-acf5-461d-adb5-32480855e11e by (Jim Gordon Mac MVP)[http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/profile/75a2b744-a259-49bb-8eb1-7db61dae9e78]

I found that it worked.

I had these URLs:

https://twitter.com/keeseter/status/578350771235872768/photo/1 https://instagram.com/p/ys5ASPCDEV/ https://igcdn-photos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/t51.2885-15/10881854_329617847240910_1814142151_n.jpg https://twitter.com/ranadotson/status/539485028712189952/photo/1 https://instagram.com/p/0OgdvyxMhW/ https://instagram.com/p/1nynTiiLSb/

I put them into an HTML file (links.html) like this:

<table>
<tr><td><a href="https://twitter.com/keeseter/status/578350771235872768/photo/1">https://twitter.com/keeseter/status/578350771235872768/photo/1</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://instagram.com/p/ys5ASPCDEV/">https://instagram.com/p/ys5ASPCDEV/</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://igcdn-photos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/t51.2885-15/10881854_329617847240910_1814142151_n.jpg">https://igcdn-photos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/t51.2885-15/10881854_329617847240910_1814142151_n.jpg</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://twitter.com/ranadotson/status/539485028712189952/photo/1">https://twitter.com/ranadotson/status/539485028712189952/photo/1</a></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://instagram.com/p/0OgdvyxMhW/">https://instagram.com/p/0OgdvyxMhW/</a></td></tr>
</table>

Then I loaded the links.html into my browser, copied, pasted into Excel, and the links were active.

Answer 6

I had a list of numbers that feed into url's I want hotlinked. For example I have Column A with question numbers (i.e., 2595692, 135171) and I want to turn these question numbers into hotlinks and to display only the question numbers.

So I built a text-only hyperlink pointing to Column A, and copied it down for all my question numbers:

="=HYPERLINK("&"""http""&"":"""&""&"&"&"""//stackoverflow.com/questions/"&A1&""""&","&A1&")"

Then I copy - paste value this column of text hyperlinks to another column.

You end up with a column of text that looks like the following:

=HYPERLINK("http"&":"&"//stackoverflow.com/questions/2595692",2595692)

Then I selected these pasted items and ran the F2Entry Macro that follows:

Sub F2Enter()
Dim cell As Range
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
For Each cell In Selection
    cell.Activate
    cell = Trim(cell)
Next cell
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
EndSub

I then deleted the text entry column and Column A.

I ended up with a single column of hotlinked question numbers:

2595692

135171

etc.

Cheers